Category: Summer Jobs

When I talk about my college summer job experience and tell people that I crawled under houses for a pest control company, they usually assume that I encountered a lot of snakes. In all three years, I only saw one snake and I wrote about that in my previous post. I got to a point where I wasn’t really concerned about snakes because I never saw them. I didn’t like mice and rats because they scamper. When they would scamper, it would scare me and I would jump. You don’t need to jump when you are crawling under a house. You will almost always bang your head on a floor joist. I hurt myself sever times because of scampering rodents.

When I was in college, my summers were spent working for a pest control company. The majority of this time was spent underneath houses. You would think with that much time under houses I might have seen a lot of snakes. There was only one time that I actually saw a snake. That was a time that my boss sent me on a job actually hunting for a snake.

The house where he sent me to was located in a part of town where we rarely went. The people who lived in these houses were the lowest of low income people. The houses were old and small. They would have been considered poorly constructed when they were built. They were more concerned about putting any food on the table instead of whether or not there might be a few bugs in the house. Things would have to be pretty bad for a family living in this house to even consider calling a pest control company. The family who lived in this particular house had called our company because they had seen a snake poking its head up between the boards in the floor of the house. I would say that was bad enough.

When I was in high school, summers were filled with sun and fun.  Many hours were spent in and around the pool. When I was in college, I worked for a pest control company during the summer for three years. I traded the poolside for the cab of a pickup truck and the crawlspace of many houses around West Tennessee. Three years at any job will yield many stories.  This is one of them.

The owner of the company sent me on a job one day that he said would be a tough one. He said there would be a lot of bugs and I wouldn’t be able to get them all but not to be discouraged. It didn’t bother me because I would be doing a pest control service which at that time meant I would be going inside instead of a termite service which was always outside and beneath houses. This job would be cleaner and cooler than most of the jobs I went on.